A 1-in-100 Investor

The first 100 days in office set the tone for any new president. Similarly, Motley Fool CAPS keeps an eye on how well investors do in their first 100 days. Some of our best -- we call them All-Stars -- have achieved scores of 100 on stock selections in their first 100 days on CAPS. In this column, we're looking at top CAPS members who made some of their best stock selections early on, and seeing which companies they think will excel next.

One of our highest-rated CAPS members is rzld36, who sports a top 99.87 member rating. A member since October 2006, rzld36 currently has 162 active picks on CAPS, out of more than 2,500 stock picks made. Achieving 77% accuracy, rzld36 has attracted 71 "groupies," CAPS members who've listed this leading investor as one of their favorites.

Here are a few of this top member's most recent stock selections, and how they were rated:

Source: Motley Fool CAPS.
^Price when call was made. Current score is how many points a member is beating (lagging) the S&P500 index from the time of the call.

With the exception of a few familiar names, these are seriously obscure picks. Let's see what other CAPS members are saying about one name in particular, and whether they agree with this top player's assessment.

Degree of risk
In the third circle of Hell, Dante threw the gluttonous sinners to forever wallow in the muck. Evocative of pigs lolling in the mud, and of those with voracious appetites who would eat anything to satisfy their desires, Dante's Divine Comedy seems to have chosen a fitting metaphor for the condition in which Citigroup finds itself today.

Pity poor Citi. Unable to contain its compulsion for ever-riskier deals, it was forced to sell a third of itself to taxpayers. The megabank is now stuck in the mire, bloated with diluted common equity, unable to generate profits, and sporting a leprous condition called Citi Holdings that causes all to flee before it.

It's true, as CAPS member ae18 says, that the government won't let Citigroup fail -- certainly not after having invested so much into it. Yet that doesn't necessarily mean we should expect Citi to outperform the market.

As All-Star member jstegma notes, unless you possess a certain expertise in valuing the potential of otherwise worthless companies, placing your money here is a risky bet:

You have heard it called a "junk stock rally". That is probably a pretty good indication that you don't need to be buying it unless you have expertise in valuing banks carrying a lot of "toxic assets" on their books that they are not required to mark to market value. You'll also need expertise in buying the minority interest of a company majority owned and controlled by the federal government. Otherwise you have no earthly reason to be messing around with this stock.

A 1-in-100 opportunity
Some of the best and smartest members in the CAPS investor intelligence community have made their mark, but it pays to start your own research on these stocks on Motley Fool CAPS. Read a company's financial reports, scrutinize key data and charts, and examine the comments your fellow investors have made, all from a stock's CAPS page.

As hockey great Wayne Gretzky once noted, "You miss 100% of the shots you never take." At Motley Fool CAPS every investor's opinion counts and since it's free to sign up, why not use this opportunity to take your best shot?